Dutchmen Arrested for Alleged Attempt on Milosevic

B E L G R A D E, Yugoslavia, July 31 -- Yugoslavia announced today that it has arrested four Dutchmen who were planning to kidnap or kill President Slobodan Milosevic.

Information Minister Goran Matic said the men were posing as amateur “weekend warriors,” but were in fact assassins sent by Western intelligence agencies to deliver a “Serbian head” to President Clinton at the July G-8 summit in Japan.

“They were arrested just before the Okinawa summit,” Matic said. “Their task was to make a present to the U.S. delegation.”

A Dutch official confirmed the identity of one of the men shown giving a video confession, and the fact that he had once been in the army as a conscript, but said he had left the service 10 years ago.

Matic said the men had been caught in Mehov Krs, an isolated corner of Serbia near Kosovo and Montenegro, about 300 miles south of Belgrade.

Matic showed a film where a man speaking in English with a Dutch accent gave his name as Johannes van Iersel; the man was telling an unidentified questioner that he and his friends had been looking for people indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Washington has offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest of Milosevic, Ratko Mladic, who commanded Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-1995 conflict in Bosnia, and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

Van Iersel said he knew Milosevic and Mladic were among those indicted. Asked about Milosevic, he said: “In case we meet him … I need to put him in a ski box ontop of the car and drive him out of the country.”

Milosevic’s ‘Head in a Box’

One of the other members of the group had a different plan, Van Iersel said, which was “to kidnap and to kill the president, and to decapitate his head and put it in a box and send it home.”

“We have all got normal jobs in our life and on weekends we like to change into uniforms,” he said, adding that there were several such groups.